When this summer ends, I feel life will go a different way, never to be quite the same. Nothing will be bad, just different. Twist one you know if you are a faithful reader. I am now 88 and that number carried more weight than I thought it would. I couldn’t pretend I was “advanced middle age ” any more. My mother moved out of her house that year in her life and I am paying attention to each day that I can do most things by myself that are required and also to what is not on that list any more, like heavy lifting and driving long trips alone. I’ll never be 39 again!
Then many of you joined me in the weather that Beryl brought to Monday. In my baby book for at least half of my life is a hurricane. In Louisiana, one watched the trough cross the Gulf, checking on where it might land and how it might be classified and what it would be named. Our family watched rain and wind action sitting on a glassed-in porch with my Daddy explaining what was happening. After the first sweep, calm of the eye, and the second wave moved onward, we would put on our rubber boots and go out to assess the outcome. Beryl did not even have reporters standing in the Gulf with a microphone, yet I woke Monday morning to extreme torrential rain and winds of only 100 mph that seemed to twist trees and snap the ends of branches instead of just bending and swaying. I am one in a million still without power and have a whole new attitude toward being prepared for what might be ahead in this year’s storm season.
Then circle around to a more permanent personal change. I married David in 1961 along with the various entrepreneurial ideas he envisioned. Mixed in with spittoons and saddle cases, he brought to life his vision of owning a chemical company. All our married life, I shared space with Texmark Chemical in Galena Park. He died in 2017, leaving to us in a struggling economy towers, and tanks and shrinking business deals. To inherit someone else’s dream is a mixture of respect and realism. This past week we have finally been able to to release keeping that dream alive. It is a breath catching moment, and amazingly freeing. After aging, a hurricane, and not being constrained by a chemical plant, something new awaits. And it will be good.
See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43: 4 – 9
Let Me Tell Ya 